“What’s that say?”
Jennifer smiled. She happily displayed them: H-I-CC-U-P G-I-R-L was spelled out, one letter on each fingernail, in black nail polish against that flashy pink background. This was her new identity. Jennifer had embraced her condition. She was now who the media had said she was.
Hiccup Girl.
* * *
Throughout it all, Jennifer said later, “What bothered me was that people thought my parents and I were profiting financially from my hiccups.” (In reality, all of Jennifer’s medical bills that had not been donated were paid through public assistance.)
Yet, that was only one small after-effect of becoming a major pop culture celebrity. The Robidoux household, as a whole, was having a difficult time dealing with the fallout after Jennifer’s star began to fade and she became just another high-school teen trying to wade her way through life. For one, the two-bedroom, ranch-style, small home they lived in was not the size home you’d expect five girls, Rachel, Chris, and Chris’s brother (who slept on a couch they placed in the dining room for him) to live in. But it was what their budget could afford, Rachel explained, and they did the best they could with what they had. Jennifer and her four sisters slept in one bedroom. No one in that small bedroom went to bed until Jennifer fell asleep, one sister later said, because Jennifer was the oldest and did what she wanted and they looked up to her.
Still, if sleeping together in such tight quarters was hard enough, the younger girls were having difficulty understanding all the attention placed on Jennifer. Being seven and five years old at the time, Destiny and McKenzie didn’t comprehend what was happening and why Jennifer was on television and in the newspapers, and why did so many people want her time and to pay attention to her?
“There was jealousy,” Rachel explained. “They kept asking me why Jennifer was getting to do things the others weren’t.”
And throughout it all, of course, Rachel was getting up at her usual 5 A.M. hour and heading off to her waitressing job, leaving the parenting to Chris, whose disability—a thyroid disease and several other “conditions,” which Chris did not want to share publicly—kept his mobility and parenting to a minimum. It had been only on her days off during the week that Rachel was able to deal with Jennifer’s hiccups and take her to appointments. Chris and Rachel, who’d experienced marital problems in the past, had not spent any time together as a couple in what seemed like months.
But when the hiccups went away, it was such a relief and burden lifted, Rachel felt as though, as a family, they could take on anything from this point forward and move in the right direction.
“I was relieved to say the least,” Rachel remembered, referring to that period when they realized the hiccups were gone for good. “It felt like the tornado we got sucked up into put us back down on the ground and we had escaped its wrath, for the most part. I envisioned Jennifer going back to school and her little sisters not feeling neglected anymore. For all that time, it seemed all about Jennifer and doctors and the media. I just wanted it all behind us, and I know Jennifer did, too. It became very overwhelming. All of it.”
* * *
During her first day of class, fellow students hugged Jennifer, one after the other. Some even clapped as she entered the building.
“I’m doing it,” Jennifer said. “I’m back in school!”
CHAPTER 42
ON THURSDAY, MARCH 15, back for just her second day of class, Jennifer looked up at her science classroom clock, where it had all started back on January 23, almost two months ago, and felt a tickle of warmth on her upper lip.
It was 8:15 A.M.
Feeling an itch, along with that warmth, Jennifer put her hand up to her nose.
“Jennifer?” a classmate said. “Are you okay?”
Blood ran down Jennifer’s nose and upper lip.
Then, all at once: Hic, hic, hic.
The hiccups had become a recurring nightmare for Jennifer, a hibernating beast waiting to lash out again. Now here she was in science class and her nose was bleeding and she was hiccupping.
What the hell? Jennifer asked herself.
The sound was quite a bit louder than it had been in the past. The hiccups, too, were much more intense, Jennifer could tell right away. They were also constant, same as when they began long ago.
Hic, hic, hic, hic . . . about fifty times per minute.
When Jennifer got home, Chris and Rachel looked at her and did not know what to say. It was horrible. This curse. This all-consuming nightmare was not over. Why them? Why again? Would the hiccups ever go away for good?
Jennifer was sitting down. A nosebleed, which she had contained shortly after it first started back in class, was now back.
Doctors recommended more medication. Rachel was tired of it all. Jennifer had not been herself since taking those medications—that is, those she wasn’t even allergic to.
“I’m not sure the hiccups and her bloody nose were connected,” Rachel explained. “I think it was just a coincidence.”
Regardless, the hiccups were enough to contend with. Not only did they take over Jennifer’s life every time they came back, but they kept her from going to school.
The only choice they could make now, if Jennifer didn’t want to fall so far behind in school that she’d have to make up an entire year, would be to start the homebound program again and stick to it for the rest of the school year. There was no use in Jennifer returning to the classroom, and possibly having to leave again and again and again. The hiccups were coming and going. Likely, Jennifer would have them for the rest of her life in some capacity.
As summer came and Jennifer celebrated her sixteenth birthday on July 28, 2007, she was able to get her hiccups under control. She had started taking Prilosec, an acid reducer used in treating patients with acid reflux, and it seemed to help. The hiccups subsided.
“Sometimes I’d get them for half a day,” Jennifer said later.
“But they always go away,” Rachel added.
The one important diagnosis, Rachel commented later, that doctors began to focus on around this time was that Jennifer suffered from Tourette’s, a claim that was supported by documentation Rachel provided. That diagnosis, Rachel said, answered a lot of questions and set them on the right path, medically speaking. There was a connection, Rachel was told, between the Tourette condition and the hiccups.11
Jennifer had changed so much from that fifteen-year-old girl with the hiccups being paraded all over the media. She’d not so much matured—at least socially—as talked and acted differently. No more was Jennifer the innocent, naïve teen who spoke so fast that sometimes it was hard to understand what she was saying. She now smiled at odd times and twitched and seemed perpetually nervous (most of which were currently considered Tourette-based tics). But on the proper meds, she was much calmer and, in some respects, easier to understand and even seemingly somewhat subdued.
* * *
Still, from where Chris Robidoux sat on the sidelines and watched Jennifer’s life unfold, he saw there was something about Jennifer that he was having a hard time dealing with: her attitude. Jennifer was cocky and belligerent. Plain and simple, she was a smart-ass. She felt as though she could parent herself, especially when Rachel was not home and Jennifer was just alone with Chris.
When her mom did come home, however, there was Jennifer, the pleasant teenager her mother thought her to be.
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Chris,” Rachel would say when Chris explained how fed up he was with Jennifer and her insolence. “Ghetto” was how Chris described Jennifer’s general demeanor. “She had that street mentality—I hated it. She had grown up around it in St. Pete, and it’s my fault.”
Not only were Chris and Jennifer arguing all the time, but Chris and Rachel were tossing it around almost on a daily basis during those days, too.
“And didn’t stop,” Chris remembered.
For Jennifer, she told me she resented Chris deeply for something the family h
ad gone through back in Vermont—a dark family scandal in which Chris had hurt Rachel emotionally and Rachel was able to forgive him eventually, but Jennifer, unfortunately, never could.12
As Jennifer sat and read about herself online, the Internet became more “vulgar” and “obscene” with postings about her. It was hard for Jennifer to read anything online any longer without recoiling and taking personally what people had to say. What didn’t help matters was that after Jennifer had run away in June of that year, as the whirlwind of media subsided and she became just another girl with the hiccups, people questioned the authenticity of her hiccups by spreading venomous rumors online. Yet, as her birthday approached, Jennifer was already talking about going back to school when classes started again that fall. She was determined to do whatever she had to in order to make it back into class with all of her peers. If she let go of school, where would she go? What would she do? This was probably one of the most important decisions Jennifer was going to make.
Today contacted Jennifer again in August for a show titled “Where Are They Now?” Producers flew Rachel, Jennifer, and Chris to New York for a weekend entirely paid for by NBC Universal.
When Jennifer returned to Florida, having been speaking with her biological father since her first appearance on Today, she had an announcement to make for Chris and Rachel.
“I want to go spend some time with Dad in Vermont.”
“I don’t see why not,” Rachel said. In fact, maybe some time away from each other would do Jennifer and Chris some good.
Jennifer took off for two weeks to stay with her biological father in Vermont.
When she returned, Chris noticed another round of immediate changes in the girl. When Rachel was not around, Jennifer was even cockier and wiser, telling Chris, “You’re not my real father. He understands me.”
Jennifer was more aggressive verbally, and entirely her own person. There was a clear indication from her that she was not going to be told what to do any longer, on any level. She was going to make her own choices and nobody was going to tell her otherwise.
* * *
As Rachel worked and Chris dealt with his disabilities, while also having to take care of three small children, they were not totally available for Jennifer. Jennifer was meeting people online and communicating once again with Tyrone O’Donnell, who was in juvenile detention. Writing to her, O’Donnell promised that when he got out, they were going to pick up the relationship where they left off.
“[Tyrone] was my first love ever,” Jennifer told me. “He was one of those types of boys you wouldn’t want your daughter around. But there was something about him that my mind and body wanted to feel.”
Jennifer said she dated Tyrone because he was “very sweet at first.” As she got to know the “bad-boy side” of Tyrone, however, as most other girls would have run far away from it, Jennifer was “attracted to that.”
Tyrone told Jennifer what she wanted to hear. She later admitted that as she grew up, she suffered from low self-esteem and thought very little of herself. Tyrone fed off that and plied Jennifer with that “love” Jennifer felt she was not getting elsewhere.
It wasn’t long after they started dating that Tyrone hauled off and smacked Jennifer in the face one day.
She cried and curled up into a fetal ball. Whimpering, she asked Tyrone, why? Why did he have to hit her?
Tyrone told Jennifer she had gotten out of line and he wouldn’t stand for it. Not ever.
So Jennifer apologized for whatever it was she had done to “make him” hit her. In her mind, it was all her fault, which made it okay for Jennifer to live with it. That’s a consequence and a lie that domestic violence convinces some of its victims to believe.
“’Cause I loved him,” Jennifer explained. “So I stayed with him.”
“I’m sorry, baby,” Tyrone would say in one breath. In the next, maybe a day later, he’d smack her again, “You’re a ho,” he’d snap while bruising Jennifer up real good. “A real piece of shit.”
“Why?” Jennifer would ask him.
“He would say,” Jennifer recalled, “‘I’m-a make you so ugly that no other motherfucker will want you.’”
The way she talked about this particular comment sounded as though, to Jennifer, Tyrone was giving her a compliment.
Jennifer went on to say she couldn’t recall how many times Tyrone hit her because it was “so often.”
“He used to always think I was cheating on him, when really, he was the one doing it to me.”
CHAPTER 43
JENNIFER DECIDED SHE was finished with high school. She wasn’t going back. What would it matter, anyway? By now, Jennifer was consistently meeting people online and going down to the park near their St. Pete home to meet up in person. The exact scenario that Rachel had feared by bringing a computer into the home had, in fact, come to fruition.
Most were kids Jennifer’s age. Many just wanted to be friends with her because of her hiccup celebrity status.
Rachel explained that Jennifer wasn’t at all disappointed the hiccups were gone for good—it was never about that. But she was, however, upset that the limelight was gone and she was no longer a household name. Jennifer, for many reasons, wanted to hold on to her fifteen minutes of fame for as long as she could, but it was over. She’d have to face it sooner or later.
“She got a big head on her,” Rachel said, “and I used to tell her that she thought she was ‘all that and a bag of chips.’”
Nobody was going to tell Jennifer what to do, Rachel realized as she watched Jennifer go through dramatic changes that fall of 2007.
Maybe Chris is right?
People from all over still wanted to talk to Jennifer about her brush with fame. Jennifer had no trouble meeting new people online because all she had to do was mention who she was—there was hardly any person in the country who paid even the slightest bit of attention to pop culture who was not familiar with Jennifer’s story.
Trying desperately to get their daughter back on track, Rachel and Chris had a tutor come to the house. Public assistance paid for it. “The paperwork alone,” Rachel explained, “was a nightmare, but we got it done.” Jennifer had left school a freshman and did not have enough credits to return as a sophomore, like the rest of her class would that fall. The more she fell behind, the deeper she sank. Jennifer wanted nothing to do with school any longer. She was going through the motions with the tutor, perhaps simply pleasing her parents. On top of that, there was talk of them moving north to Spring Hill, Florida, and Jennifer would have to transfer schools.
“I’m not doing this anymore,” Jennifer told Rachel one day.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m done.”
They talked about Jennifer getting her GED and maybe attending cosmetology school, a dream Jennifer had from childhood.
While Rachel worked, Jennifer was at home: no schoolwork to do, no obligations to speak of. Within that new family dynamic, Chris and Jennifer couldn’t stand to be in the same room together—albeit, with a mere four rooms in the entire house to contend with. Chris was worried how much the hiccup fame had changed his stepdaughter. He’d never seen her act so arrogantly. Just the way she spoke, the language she used—it was a clear indication to Chris that the street had gotten hold of Jennifer.
“She’s definitely trying to spread her wings,” Rachel remembered, going back to those days when Jennifer was wandering through her teenage years, wondering what to do, waiting on that next thing.
“And the problem was that Jennifer was a follower,” Jennifer’s sister Ashley McCauley later explained. Jennifer’s closest sister, who had sat by and witnessed all of what was happening, felt helpless. She looked on as Jennifer started smoking cigarettes at the age of thirteen, and Ashley warned her about the problems that would eventually cause. Ashley had watched as Jennifer moved on to weed and “took pills” and began having sex with various boys. Now, with the crowd Jennifer had started to run with, Ashley was telling Jennifer almo
st every day to watch herself. The game she was getting into on the street was for real. The streets played for keeps. Jennifer was not conditioned to survive that lifestyle.
“Let’s send her to my mom’s,” Rachel suggested to Chris one night.
Jennifer had complained about privacy. She needed her space. The deal was if she went to Rachel’s parents, she would meet with a tutor regularly.
Jennifer agreed. She was actually excited. Giving schoolwork another try seemed like the right thing to do. She’d have her own room. She could, at least, take the time to try and figure out what she was going to do with her life. Chris decided that Jennifer wasn’t going to just sit around and wait for her life to begin. They were going to make those choices for her as long as she lived in the house.
That seemingly good idea failed. Rachel’s parents didn’t like people coming into their home during the early-morning hours, disrupting their lives, tutoring Jennifer. These were elderly people set in their ways. Jennifer was a lot to handle. Rachel’s parents lived near downtown, too, so Jennifer could take off and meet her people. And it wasn’t as if they could leave Jennifer by herself. If keeping her out of trouble was a goal, well, Jennifer needed constant supervision.
So Jennifer moved in with a friend. Rachel insisted the tutors go there and meet with her.
But that didn’t work out, either.
So she moved back home—which was when things between Chris and Jennifer took on an entire new level of dysfunction.
One Breath Away Page 16